Mail Order Cowboy

I have a degree in early childhood development. The daycare that I worked at recently had to close, so I’m out of a job right now. I’m also out of an apartment, but that’s a long dramatic story.

—S

Lily is four months old. She doesn’t sleep through the night and I think I’m about to die of exhaustion. Cows don’t delay their care, even if babies don’t sleep, it turns out. She doesn’t take after me. If I hadn’t had a paternity test done I almost wouldn’t have believed she was mine. Too sweet, for one thing. And she’s the prettiest little thing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know a damn thing about babies.

—J

She sounds perfect.

—S

She would be, if I weren’t drowning. I need help. Room and board, plus the pay we discussed previously.

—J

I can get there in a week.

—S

I’ve got all your flight info. I’ll be at the airport to get you.

—J

You can’t miss me. I’ll be the one with the bright, flowered suitcase. I’m plain and tall.

—S

A week after that...

SAVANNAH STURM STOOD in the tiny airport and looked around. She’d come into gate number three, and it turned out it was... Well, it was gate three out of three. In the only terminal the airport had.

She had been worried that her new employer, Jackson, might need a sign to help her find him. Now she imagined she’d just look for the man with the baby, assuming he was a man with a baby and not an ax murderer. The possibility was there that all of this was a scam of some kind. She was counting on him ringing alarm bells while they were here in public if she needed to be scared of him.

She adjusted the strap on her carry-on bag and stuffed her hands in her sweatshirt pockets, walking in line with the people who had just gotten off the very small plane and through a revolving door that led to...

What looked like the lone baggage carousel.

She stopped and looked around. The waiting area had a smattering of people in it. Not many, but that wasn’t terribly surprising since her plane couldn’t have had more than fifty people on it.

She didn’t see a man with a baby.

The main doors to the outside slid open. The man who walked in was head and shoulders above everyone else in the room, a black cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He was wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up, revealing muscular forearms that had lumberjack-caliber definition.

And he was holding a little pink bucket seat with a lacy blanket draped over the top.

Fathers of infants should not look like that. They should not look like every bad boy fantasy she’d never allowed herself to have. Fathers of infants shouldn’t look like fantasies at all. They should look softer. Less angular. And he certainly shouldn’t make her stomach tighten, and her body remember that it had been a very, very long time since she had been touched by a man.

And even longer since she had particularly wanted to be.

She blinked, grabbing hold of herself and retrieving her consciousness from that strange space it had just been in. She wasn’t here to check out a hot man. She was here to do a job. To reclaim the broken pieces of a life that hadn’t even been hers anymore after a particularly traumatic divorce.

She had herself firmly back together. Breathing normally.

Until she realized with absolute certainty that this wasn’t just any hot dad wandering through the airport terminal.

It was the hot dad she was waiting for.

Jackson Reid.

He was nothing like what she’d expected. She felt silly, suddenly, that she’d had an expectation at all. But a single dad with a tiny baby made her think of someone soft, and the man she’d corresponded with online had seemed...maybe even sweet.

Checking out her boss in the first ten seconds of meeting him was kind of a bad start. But then, she supposed she could forgive herself that. She’d been with Darren for five years, and during that time, it had never even occurred to her to check another man out. Finding herself unattached again was presenting some interesting side effects.

That was all this was. That part of herself naturally inclined toward seeking attachment reminding her that she currently didn’t have one. And all she had to do was remind that part that she didn’t want one. She squared her shoulders and crossed the space, standing closer to the baggage carousel, but also a little bit nearer to Jackson.

Who was apparently a hard-bodied cowboy.

She waited for him to see her. Waited for him to close that remaining distance. But he didn’t. Instead, he continued to scan the crowd, such as it was, his eyes skipping over her easily. She didn’t know how to feel about that. Particularly since her eyes had gone immediately to him, and had had a nearly impossible time leaving.

She cleared her throat and looked back at the baggage carousel. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe she was still waiting for Jackson Reid. Maybe it was some other man all by himself with a little baby. Maybe this man was waiting for his wife.

A wife who would no doubt be pretty and petite, and as striking as he was.

A wife who was probably sexually confident and not frigid and buried under years and years of issues.

She took a deep breath, and the conveyor belt on the carousel began to turn. People crowded in, collecting their bags. She wasn’t expecting hers to show up anytime soon. It was her own little Murphy’s Law that her bag was always last off the plane. She wasn’t quite sure how.

Not that she had traveled very much. She’d gone on a few little trips before her marriage. A post-graduation excursion to Disney World with some friends, a couple of spring breaks where she had been fully out of her element and had spent most of the time in the hotel room sober and trying to pretend she didn’t know her friends were hooking up with strangers a floor above her.

Then she had met Darren and they’d taken that first trip to Colorado to meet his parents, and then had moved to his hometown to be surrounded by his family. A family that had, at first, seemed like a dream to her, given her own parents. She’d settled into a life that had slowly grown more and more confining in ways that Savannah hadn’t totally realized until she had been free of it.

Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t realized the baggage carousel had emptied out, and her flowery, purple bag was going by. She grabbed hold of it, happy that the cheerful color and pattern made it easy to spot. Always being the last bag helped, too.

She hefted it off the carousel and turned around, and her eyes collided with his.

Oh, it was definitely him.

“Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.

“I think I’m waiting for you,” she said, looking down meaningfully at the little pink bundle.

“Savannah Sturm?”

“Yes,” she confirmed.

His eyes landed on her suitcase. “I suppose your description of the bag was true enough.”

She blinked, looking up at him, and wondered if he had been thrown off because she had characterized herself as tall. Well, at nearly six feet, she was. But then, Jackson had to be nearing six-five, so it was entirely possible he didn’t see tall the same way that she did.